Journalist Brandon Soderberg and I use Ti West's Sacrement to talk about horror, being in a room, internet documentaries and a lot more. 

I talk to writer and cultural critic Claire Lobenfeld about horror's ending problem, punchline endings in horror and what Gregg Araki can do to a young mind. 

I talk to journalist Jason Walsh about The Thing and what he'd like horror to be. 

Built Dublin's Lisa Cassidy and I use Bernard Rose's Candyman to a different perspective on horror before discussing the role architecture plays in the film. 

Let's get started.

Bringing their review of comics in 2012 to a close, Sean and Brandon give a full episode over to discussing their mutual favourite book of the year. Josh Simmons' Furry Trap is less a collection of horror comics than a man howling in the wilderness and in this episode we attempt to even just scratch the surface of all the elements that make it incredible.

Warning: this episode necessarily contains graphic descriptions of sexual violence and every slur you can think of.

In part three of there End of Year bloodletting Sean and Brandon examine the explosion of “genrified” art comics. What does “genre” mean? Why is trying to be smart the least smart thing you can do? How many awkward things can Sean say about the Punisher’s visit to Ierland? And how is Johnny Ryan’s splatter punk battle-manga tribute Prison Pit similar to Samuel Beckett?

In this episode Sean and Brandon discuss the comics from 2012 that took what could typically found in underground comics and did something interesting with them. We look at what Micheal Deforge’s Lose #4, how he’s changing the anthology pattern and everything else he’s doing in some depth.

We talk about the seering honestly of Sad Sex by Heather Benjamin that takes a beloved underground comix trope, sad sex, to a completely brutal, original and peerless place.

We look at a bunch of comics taking the well-trodden teenage/early-20s loser stories to strange new places.

And to finish we talk about Derf’s My Friend Dahmer, a level-headed, painfully honest account of what Dahmer’s pre-infamy teenage years were like from someone who was actually there.